Welcome to The Times of Israel’s upgraded site

Five and a half years after we launched The Times of Israel, with a pledge to provide independent, non-partisan, fair-minded and free coverage of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, you’re today looking at our newly upgraded site.

It’s been an extraordinary stretch, in which, out of nowhere, The Times of Israel has established itself as a market leader. And we’ve spent the past several months redesigning the site to better serve our readers — adopting key improvements and introducing technological advances that have become available since we launched in February 2012.

Gradually, since we started, The Times of Israel has grown to a monthly readership of 3.5 million people worldwide, and some 18 million page views… and that’s in quiet months. More than 150,000 of you subscribe to our various daily newsletters. We have a thriving Startup Israel section devoted to Israeli technology and innovation. We’ve introduced four foreign-language versions of The Times of Israel — in French, Arabic, Chinese and Persian. And our network of partnerships with major Jewish publications is constantly growing, and now constitutes a unique platform that brings together quality journalism from across the Jewish world.

A frankly staggering 7,000 people around the world have opened blogs at The Times of Israel — weighing in across the spectrum on just about every issue of interest and significance to our diverse tribe in our turbulent reality. And perhaps most importantly in terms of our central journalistic purpose, we have gradually increased our reporting staff here at The Times of Israel, enabling us to do more original work — to be more informative, to break more ground.

The upgraded site is designed to showcase all of that content with an emphasis on usability. It’s meant to be easy to read, to display our content effectively and attractively, to require fewer clicks — in short, to be even more user-friendly.

Overseen in partnership with our creative, careful and inexhaustible colleagues at RGB Media, with whom we built the original site, the upgraded site allows for the improved display of articles on our carefully curated homepage, which is updated 24/7.

We’ve built elegant new templates that distinguish between news and features and analysis pieces and blog posts. Our homepage and article pages display more effectively on larger screens. Our article pages feature a cleaner, less crowded design, and also include a better representation of the homepage at the side of each article. We have introduced an infinite scroll — finish one article, and you’ll be able to seamlessly move on to another — making it easier to access more information and content. And we’ve refined our topic pages, so it’s easier to find all our coverage of specific subjects.

A wealth of back-end improvements insure that the site loads faster and is more snappy. Technological advances mean that the site itself, and the daily newsletters we send out, are able to respond to, and to display most effectively on, whichever device you happen to be using — your home computer, tablet or cellphone.

What you’re seeing today is a major part of a comprehensive redesign. Just ahead will be more and better use of multimedia content. We’ll also be upgrading our blog platform — a major step given that it is a home for so many writers. And we’ll be rolling out the upgraded design in our other languages and for our partner sites.

As always, this kind of upgrade is a process. We hope you like it. Try things out. Tell us either way. Some things may need more work, and we ask you to help us if you have suggestions, or if you see problems, by bringing them to our attention. You can write to us at office@timesofisrael.com and/or comment below this article.

Running a 24/7 website that often deals with life-and-death issues and that millions of people have come to rely upon is something we take very seriously, and that involves ongoing discussion with you. We welcome your feedback. We welcome you to the upgraded Times of Israel.